CHANNELS

July 2010

Itâ€™s summer and itâ€™s hot, which means you have the perfect excuse to wear comfortable, flat sandals for work and play, but that doesnâ€™t mean your footwear has to be unstylish or sloppy. From gladiator-inspired sandals to peep-toe ballet flats, the options are endless, and they afford you no excuse for worn-out flip flops, which doctors have said can cause more foot problems than high heels because of lack of support.

Yesterday, we told you about Chocomize, one of two companies offering DIY chocolate bars. Two of the ingredients that immediately caught our eye were the beef jerky and vegetarian bacon. Surely, we thought, these are only here for shock value. We had to ask if anyone had actually given them a try.

To which we say, who are these people? Chocolate beef jerky and bacon? We’re not even sure if This Is Why You’re Fat has a category for that yet.

But we really do want to know, who’s coming up with these combos? So, we’re going to do a small giveaway to find out.

Dell has been touting it’s massive Streak smartphone for quite some time now. The phone has been out in the UK for some time now, and is supposed to be coming to the US in “late July.” It’s late July now, and we haven’t heard a lot from Dell about the release of the product.

On Tuesday Dell posted a video on YouTube announcing that, as rumored, the US version of the Dell Streak will only be available on AT&T’s network. So it looks like that for now those hoping to get the 5-inch smartphone/tablet on T-Mobile will just have to wait, or deal with EDGE data. The video also showed off the Streak running it’s customized skin on top of Android 2.1. The phone will ship (and has shipped in the UK) running on Android 1.6, and an update to Froyo has been promised for shortly after launch.

If you use Facebook – and at this point, nearly everyone does, you’ve surely seen friends requesting farm equipment for Farmville, clothes in Sorority Life, cooking supplies in Cafe World, or any number of items for any number of social games that dominate the platform.

Playdom, the company behind Sorority Life, Social City and Treetopia among many others, was officially acquired today by Disney for $563.2 million, with the potential for another $200 million based on performance.

The hottest new personalized product service is Chocomize, a New York-based Web company that offers custom-made candy bars, designed by the consumer and shipped right to their door. Chocomize offers a choice of up to five out of 90 ingredients to add to your choice of chocolate bark for over 30 million combinations to create â€œchocolate exactly the way you want it.â€

You may have heard that Facebook recently hit 500 million members. According to Google AdPlanner, in June the popular social network received 540 million unique visitors, so there’s some evidence that the site’s open graph initiative is working in expanding the reach of the site even beyond its massive user base.

But what’s really interesting is how Facebook has penetrated the wealthy web. First, a little background on why we focus on internet trends among $100,000+ households. The only site which reaches more wealthy US users is Yahoo, who reaches 56% of the $100k+ online population, compared to Facebook’s 51% (Google may reach more, though they don’t include themselves in their AdPlanner stats, so it’s difficult to pinpoint exact numbers).

Good design is for the birds. Literally, Joe Papendick turns his design focus to our feather friends, and modern, sculptural pieces designed to catch not only the human eye, but hopefully a bird’s eye view as well.

It seems you can’t go a week or so without hearing about the newest and greatest Android phone. Phones with the Google mobile OS are coming almost too fast at times, with most of them coming from HTC or Motorola, and maybe Samsung and LG. There’s also a lot of smaller companies that use Android for cheaper phones, and even PC manufacturers like Dell are in the mix. Now we have another PC manufacturer, Acer coming with it’s own Android phone. {Engadget}

The smartphone is dubbed the Acer Stream, and it runs on a modified Android 2.1. The Android version actually looks pretty slick, with the navigation bar halfway down the screen rather than on top. Below the bar is a collection of 6 apps that can be changed by the user. Above the bar is what appears to be screens of recently used functions, though that’s a bit unclear. It looks fairly similar to the cards used in WebOS for multitasking. Apps are accessed by flicking upwards, and revealing the rest of the apps which have to be navigated by flicking left and right between pages. To add to the difference, the navigation bar is pushed to the bottom while inside any app.

Cathy Horyn may not be a fan of Snooki’s inexplicable fame – in the snarky writeup heard ’round the web, Horyn describes the diminutive reality star as a “not conventionally attractive… like a turnip turned on its tip.”

Perhaps viewers just want something different from reality stars like Heidi Montag who achieve conventional prettiness by any means necessary, and self appointed style experts like Lauren Conrad. For whatever it says about pop culture and our entertainment choices as a society, the Jersey Shore has helped boost MTV’s year over year viewership, and parent company Viacom’s earnings outlook along with it.